Heya! 1Password employee here. We have never locked anyone out of their 1Password Account for missing a payment, and we never will.
Whenever your subscription lapses your 1Password account will instead go into a "frozen" state. While your account is frozen, you can still view, use, and even export all your items, copy your passwords, and even copy items to vaults outside your account.
The only things you won't be able to do while an account is frozen is add new items to vaults, edit existing items, invite people to your family or team, or autofill items in your browser.
It's common to see items temporarily go into that offline items list (sometimes only for a second) prior to it being synced to your 1Password Account, but as soon as that sync is complete, it should disappear from that list.
Are you only noticing older items in that offline items list, or are newly created items also showing up there? Likewise, if you search for the items you're seeing in that offline list in your 1Password Account, do you happen to see an entry that matches and contains the same information?
For what it's worth, I'm not aware of there being multitudes of people running into the same thing you're seeing -- it's part of why this particular case is so odd to me.
I do see that you're in touch with Erik regarding gift cards, though, and that's definitely an alternative that should get you back into a workable state!
We use Stripe as our payment processor, and ultimately that's what handles the credit card validation side of things. If you're seeing yourself routinely declined with the same card, there's likely something going on with that particular payment card that's outside of our control.
If you're already in touch with us via email, feel free to send us another follow-up message and be sure to mention me by name -- I'd be more than happy to take a second look at things with you.
Whenever your subscription lapses your 1Password account will instead go into a "frozen" state. While your account is frozen, you can still view, use, and even export all your items, copy your passwords, and even copy items to vaults outside your account.
The only things you won't be able to do while an account is frozen is add new items to vaults, edit existing items, invite people to your family or team, or autofill items in your browser.